S.M.A.R.T.D
Whats it?
- Smartd stands for SMART Disk Monitoring Daemon.
- smartd is a daemon that monitors the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives.
- SMART is a monitoring system for computer hard disks to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.
Smart Developers:
- Bruce Allen (Initiator and Project Leader)
- A professor of physics at the U. of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, and a Director of the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover
- Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Windows interface & cygwin package
- Christian Franke (Developer and Maintainer)?
- other open source contributions include some small patches for Cygwin and Mozilla.org (Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey and Bugzilla) codebase, a Windows port of hdparm, and a recent Cygwin port of GRUB2.
Other Contributors
- Casper Dik (Solaris SCSI interface)?
- Christian Franke (Windows interface and Cygwin package)?
- Douglas Gilbert (SCSI subsystem)?
- Guido Guenther (Autoconf/Automake packaging)?
- Geoffrey Keating (Darwin ATA interface)?
- Eduard Martinescu (FreeBSD interface)?
- Frederic L. W. Meunier (Web site and Mailing list)?
- Keiji Sawada (Solaris ATA interface)?
- Sergey Svishchev (NetBSD interface)?
- David Snyder and Sergey Svishchev (OpenBSD interface)?
- Phil Williams (User interface and drive database)?
- Shengfeng Zhou (Linux Highpoint RocketRaid interface)?
Installation
- On Debian based systems
# apt-get install smartmontools
- On rpm based distros
# yum install smartmontools
- Path
/usr/sbin/smartd
How to check if the harddisk is smart capable?
# smartctl -i /dev/hda
If we get the following output for the above command then its smart capable.
SMART support is: Available – device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
Enable smartd at startup
- To Enable at bootup
# /sbin/chkconfig –add smartd
- To disable at bootup
# /sbin/chkconfig –del smartd
Starting & Restarting
- smartmontools provides a start-up script in
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/smartd which is responsible for starting and stopping
- start smartd by giving the command:
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/smartd start
- and stop it by using the command:
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/smartd stop
- smartd will attempt to enable SMART monitoring on ATA devices and polls these and SCSI devices every 30 minutes (configurable)?
- The default location for these SYSLOG notifications and warnings is /var/log/messages.
- smartd can be configured at start-up using the configuration file /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf
Checking overall health
- Performing a SMART overall-health self-assessment test
# smartctl -Hc /dev/hda
- For vender specific SMART attributes
# smartctl -A /dev/hda
smartd.conf: sample entries
- /dev/hda -a m admin@example.com,root@localhost
- /dev/hdc -a -I 194 -I 5 -i 12 -s L/../../7/03
Checking status using signals
- the superuser can make smartd check the status of the disks at any time by sending it the SIGUSR1 signal
- kill -SIGUSR1 <pid>
or
- killall -USR1 smartd
Advantages
- smartd provides a flexible way by which we can monitor hard disk health.
Disadvantage
- We can only predict a certain percentage (64%) of hardisk failures by smart.
- Failures that occur abruptly such as defective electronic equipment or mechanical failure may lead to failure of harddrive without any earlier warnings.
References
- smartd manpage
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/
Article Authored by Rahul Janak
Author, Rahul, is a Systems Engineer with SupportPRO. Rahul specializes in Level 1 Linux Administration. SupportPRO offers 24X7 technical support services to Web hosting companies and service providers.
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